E-Commerce

The Key to Your Online Business Success! With customers able to buy anything, from anywhere, at any time, E-Commerce is one of the reasons for the surge in popularity of the Internet.

Kimberley Web Design can help you set up your online shop whether it be just a few products sold by a simple PayPal “Buy Now Button” or an online shop that processes payments on site. The following information should make things easier for you to understand.

It is also a good idea to have some sort of E-commerce Marketing Plan, a plan that will help you solidify your thoughts. Ask yourself, what is my market, freight costs, competition, what makes my product better than others? Will you be using social media, such as facebook and twitter, will you run contests, giveaways, email campaigns?

E-Commerce can be a complicated process to set up, our aim is to help you Turn browsers into Buyers and to make sure your website is great looking, easy to use and reaches customers across all business sectors. Click here to see our E-Commerce Portfolio.

There are several ways of accepting Credit Cards On-Line. You can either use a Payment Processor or a Payment Gateway.

Payment Gateways

The customer completes the transaction and has clicked the “To buy button”. The information is then passed to the Payment Gateway/Processor, payment gateway checks validity, then communicates that information back to the website. At this point the information can go two ways:

If the credit card card is declined it goes back to your site (usually with a message, “transaction declined” please try again”) This method is very user friendly, as it gives instant feedback as they may have typed in the wrong information.

If everything checks out, the payment processor says to your merchant account that the transaction is okay and the merchant account will take the money out of the credit card issuing account and put it into your account. It also communicates with your customer in your website to say that the transaction was good and gives confirmation of the order to your customer.

All of this works invisibly to the customer.

Payment Processors

Transactions are processed on a delayed basis. Transactions on the web site are completed before the credit card is authorised. Authorisation doesn’t come back immediately, the customer is usually passed off to the processors site to complete payment – you lose unique branding, the customer is directed to payment processors such as Google Checkout or PayPal.

The authorisation is posted to the website after the fact, the processing can take up to anything, from a couple of minutes to a day, and as far as the customer knows the transaction is good, you have said thanks and they’re on their way and then the merchant (you) gets notification, saying whether it was approved or not. So the customer is notified later if the transaction failed and that’s a break in the action and could cost you the sale, u can lose a lot of your impulse buyers.

Payment processors, usually don’t require a merchant account and more often cost less to set up and sometimes they are free but usually their percentages and transaction fees are more.

Merchant Account

A Merchant Account acts as, a go between, for the gateway and your business account. Most of the major banks offer payment gateways with their merchant banking services.

A Merchant Account is an agreement that you have with a bank that has agreed to allow you to charge people’s credit card, while they honor it and deposit the funds into your account. The bank is responsible, via the issued Merchant Account, for debiting the funds from the customer and depositing it into your account.

The advantages can be lower credit card percentage fees, fees refundable on returns, less expensive on higher volume sites, much shorter wait time for money, ability to use your own ordering system, able to sell any kind of product/services, more control over sales, refunds & charge-backs. Some of the disadvantages may be a startup fee and monthly fees.

Kimberley Web Design have the resources and knowledge to build you a successful e-Commerce site, tailored to suit your budget and requirements. We know how to produce solutions that deliver results and inspire customer confidence, from branding to navigation, usability to support. Call us on 0438 669 509 or click here to email us today and lets discuss your next project together.